Tag Archives: roast chicken

Food porn excess: Woman uses $400 hair dryer to make roasted chicken

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Helen Rosner, a food writer for The New Yorker, uploaded a photo of herself using a $400 Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer to blow dry a whole chicken.

“Happy snow day, I am using an astonishingly expensive hair dryer to remove all moisture from a chicken to maximize skin crispiness when I roast it,” Rosner writes in the post, which has earned over 1,600 likes and 100 comments.

Rosner went on to share the recipe for her roasted chicken, but fans were most interested in the first stage of her process – the hair dryer.

“For crisp skin, whether you’re cooking a chicken or a duck or a fish, you want there to be as little water moisture as possible, which is sped up by a fan. And that’s all a hair-dryer really is — a hand-held fan that you can pretty easily bring into the kitchen,” she said to Allure, likening the process to Food Network star Alton Brown using a box fan to make beef jerky.

 

Simple roast chicken with a digital tip-sensitive thermometer

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Food safety has never been Mark Bitman’s strong point. The author of Don’t blame sprouts, and For the love of a good burger (in which he advocated rare hamburger consumption) usually sides with polemic rather than evidence. But yesterday in the N.Y. Times, Bittman offered his simple recipe for roast chicken and advocated the use of a thermometer.

1. “Put a cast-iron skillet on a low rack in the oven and heat the oven to 500 degrees. Rub the chicken all over with the oil and sprinkle it generously with salt and pepper.

2. “When the oven and skillet are hot, carefully put the chicken in the skillet, breast side up. Roast for 15 minutes, then turn the oven temperature down to 350 degrees. Continue to roast until the bird is golden brown and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the meaty part of the thigh reads 155 to 165 degrees.”

Been doing a variation of this for years (right). In the accompanying video, Bittman makes no mention of the thermometer and instead says there should be the “tiniest trace of pink,” along with lots of cross-contamination, but it’s a baby step.